James Campbell: Peter Dutton was asleep at the wheel on Australia’s visa mess

Australia’s visa system may well be broken but to lay all of the blame at the feet of Labor, as Peter Dutton is trying to do, is absurd.

Peter Dutton called into Ray Hadley last week on the occasion of the announcement of the Sydney radio man’s retirement.

Dutton has long loved Hadley’s show as a safe space where can give voice to those inner thoughts which some colleagues would prefer remain unsaid.

After congratulating Hadley on his career, attempting to crack wise about the Ruddster’s predicament under the second Trump Administration and in the process revealing a Dutton joke is no laughing matter, the talk turned to immigration.

During this, out of nowhere, Dutton offered the following: “then you’ve got this other problem of the Government’s creation where people are refusing to go home, even if they’re on, say, a student visa in some cases, they apply for protection onshore.

“The matters aren’t decided for seven years by the time it goes through the courts, but you get work rights, in some cases you can get welfare and housing, and these people are making application in record number.

“Again, they’re treating Australian taxpayers like a cash cow and treating our country as a joke, and the Prime Minister just doesn’t have the ability or the strength to stand up to it.”

Are international students gaming the system?

You betcha.

Peter Dutton is putting the student visa system back on the agenda. Picture: Linda Higginson

To quote a newspaper report about the crisis at the – recently abolished – AAT: “Thousands of foreign nationals meant to be in Australia on short-term study visas are spending up to a decade in the workforce, with authorities powerless to stop the rort.”

The Sunday Herald Sun investigation found “rejected international students spending up to five years appealing Department of Home Affairs decisions that they must leave.”

Worse while they wait for their appeals to be heard “rejected students are spending years on bridging visas, giving them unlimited work rights.”

Examples included a Filipino woman who arrived in Australia in 2006 as a student and 14 years later was still fighting a decision to cancel her visa and an Indian student given three bridging visas despite no evidence of any enrolments for more than three years.

Unfortunately as a stick to beat Albo this isn’t much use as the news report in question is dated March 2020 at which time the country’s immigration system had been in the hands of a Coalition Government for six and half years.

Moreover the snoozer who presided over this situation, first as Immigration Minister between 2014 and 2018 and later Home Affairs supremo between 2017 and 202 was none other than Peter Dutton himself.

At the time when Herald Sun reporter Matt Johnston and I wrote this report, there were more than 10,000 students waiting for the AAT to review their visa cancellations with each taking an average of 77 weeks to be heard.

Thousands of foreign nationals meant to be in Australia on short-term study visas are spending up to a decade in the workforce, the AAT found. Picture: Brendan Radke

These were not asylum cases mind you, they were student visa cancellations.

In each case when the ‘student’ had exhausted their rights of appeal the whole process would start again with a protection visa application.

Between 2016 and 2020 the number of immigration cases on hand at the AAT jumped from less than 6,000 to more than 30,000.

In other words the idea this is a problem of Labor’s creation, as Dutton told Ray Hadley, is absurd as a quick look at the number of people on bridging visas reveals.

In 2014 the year Dutton took over as Immigration Minister there were 107,000 people in the county on bridging visas.

By the time he left Home Affairs in 2021, it was 360,000, before peaking a year later at 373,000.

And chances are that if Covid hadn’t come along causing the borders to be closed it would have been higher still.

In the three months to April 2020 alone, the number of people in Australia on temporary protection visas leapt 30 per cent!

Not much to crow about is it?

Which isn’t to say, as the Australian reported recently, the number of international students lodging reviews of their student visa refusal or cancellation, isn’t surging

It is.

In the year to the end of August, 15,754 appeals were lodged – 4863 of them in July and August alone – compared with 2244 the whole year before.

But as Dutton well knows the reason these numbers are growing is because the number of student visa refusals is also growing.

True the number of onshore asylum on hand is also surging, from 29,794 a month after Labor took office to 33,404 at the end of June.

But there are a couple of things to say about this.

Firstly, it’s a lot less than the 42,000 cases that were afoot in Dutton’s last year as Home Affairs Minister.

Secondly a surge in onshore asylum applications was entirely to be expected as the temporary pandemic visas of tens of thousands of people expired.

None of which is to say Labor has handled immigration well. It hasn’t.

But for Dutton to somehow claim Labor broke the system is nonsense.

Originally published as James Campbell: Peter Dutton was asleep at the wheel on Australia’s visa mess